11.20.16 10:00 PM ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE—When a small private Cessna Citation plane landed after dark at Haiti’s Toussaint l’Ouverture airport on Nov. 10, 2015, it wasn’t the traditional airport band that greeted its two passengers, but local and U.S narcotics agents.

Efraín Antonio Campo Flores, 31, and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freita, 30, nephews of Venezuela’s first lady, Cilia Flores, were immediately arrested and flown to the United States.

“The tip came from the Dom Rep,” an intelligence source directly familiar with the case in Haiti told The Daily Beast. The private Citation aircraft had stopped in the Dominican Republic before heading on to Haiti, according to the source, who said the two nephews were supposed to be “on semi-official business.”

It was not clear why the aircraft made the stop in the Dominican Republic and then went on to neighboring Haiti, but the source confirmed it was not to refuel, and Dominican officials definitely did not want the arrest to take place there. “The DR authorities were thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, they’re the Petrocaribe friends! Let them go over there [to Haiti].’”

Ah, Petrocaribe: one of the Caracas regime’s most important tools for building regional influence. The organization was set up more than a decade ago by then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to lighten the burden of imported oil costs for his Central American and Caribbean neighbors, and draw them more closely into his orbit. Over time, several countries in the region became addicted to Chavista largesse.

So there was an inclination by the dependent Caribbean governments to deal gingerly with anyone who had, or might have, Petrocaribe connections. And the nephews of the wife of current President Nicolás Maduro? Those were not people you wanted to pick a fight with.

Asked why the private Citation aircraft and its passengers weren’t apprehended in the Dominican Republic in the first place, the source told The Daily Beast, “It was a let your neighbor take the fall,” then he paused, “or get the credit.”

In any case there was no way the Flores boys were going to walk out of Toussaint l’Ouverture Airport as free men.

The indictment states that “five kilograms and more of mixtures and substances containing a detectable amount of cocaine” were found onboard the Citation aircraft at the time of the Flores arrest in Haiti. But that was just a taste of what they were plotting to bring into the States.

The two Flores cousins had been under investigation for a month, according to the indictment unsealed by the Southern District Court of New York, and they were charged with conspiring to smuggle 800 kilograms (1,764 pounds) of cocaine into the U.S. via Honduras.

Much of the evidence grew out of conversations the two nephews of the first lady had in Caracas and Honduras with DEA informants posing as drug traffickers. And the DEA agents making the arrests here in Haiti probably thought they had an open-and-shut case. But when the case went to trial in the United States it took a new twist.

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According to court records cited in detail by the Associate Press, the two informants were a father and son team who continued to sell narcotics on the side while peddling information to the DEA for six- and even seven-figure sums. Jose Santos-Pena, the 55-year-old father, had been on the DEA books for years, receiving upward of $1 million from the U.S. government. His son, Jose Santos-Hernandez, got hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then, just as the Flores case was ready to go to trial, the two pleaded guilty to dealing drugs while on the DEA payroll. Testimony from the father revealed more infractions, like using cocaine throughout the investigation, and allowing his son’s friends to sit in on some of the DEA phone calls about Venezuelan targets.

The vaudevillian display in the U.S. court by the DEA’s own key witnesses seemed to defy reason. At the end of the day, the jury returned a guilty verdict, but this was no open-and-shut case, and it is not surprising that the defenders of the Flores cousins are still trying to prove it was politically motivated.

The conviction on Friday came on the heels of a string of U.S. investigations of high-ranking Venezuelan officials allegedly involved in narcotrafficking since former President Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, joining the ranks of other left-wing governments that swept into office in Latin America in the late 1990s.

In 2005, Chavez expelled the Drug Enforcement Agency’s representatives, and according to several sources the DEA’s genuine concerns about trafficking mingled with a spirit of vendetta against the Chavistas.

In August 2015, two former leading officials of Venezuela’s anti-narcotics agency were indicted in absentia by U.S. federal courts for facilitating drug traffickers’ shipments from Colombia. General Nestor Luis Revrol Torres was a particular target of that investigation, but days after his indictment was unsealed, he was promoted to the cabinet level position of interior minister, running the country’s law enforcement. The list runs long. In September 2015, the U.S. unsealed indictments against Pedro Luis Martin Olivares, the former chief of finance for the intelligence service, and also the former anti-drug tsar, Jesus Alfredo Itriago.

But with the arrests of the Flores nephews, the DEA has gotten up close and personal.

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Even if the Caracas government were inclined to cooperate with Washington, which clearly it is not, the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with Venezuela.On the other hand those alleged criminals who can be lured or tricked into a stop on Haitian territory appear to have virtually no protection.

One example: Fabio Lobo Lobo, the son of former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, was arrested in May 2015 in Haiti during a joint operation between Haiti’s BPLS, the anti-narcotic Haitian police division, and the DEA.

Despite the risks, there might be several incentives for wanted drug traffickers to visit Haiti. It has been a favored transshipment point going back as far as 1985, when barely visible landing strips speckled the island, many of which were run by high-ranking Haitian military officers. Today, according to the source The Daily Beast spoke to, transhipment in Haiti is at an all-time high.

Meanwhile U.S.-Venezuelan relations have steadily deteriorated since Chavez came to power, and diplomacy has given way to uncompromising vitriol on both sides. But as often as Washington denounces what is going on in Caracas, it has shown no appetite to intervene directly.

Maduro, who succeeded to the presidency in 2013 after Chavez died of cancer, has faced angry, widespread opposition to nearly two decades of socialist policies that have been badly managed and brought the country’s economy to the brink. In 2002, Venezuela’s opposition took to staging “million-people marches,” but to little avail.

Today, Maduro faces the same opposition, clamoring with pots and pans through Caracas’s central avenues. The movement is making a lot of noise, but so far, has been unable to unseat its president.

If the DEA believed the Flores case might contribute to Maduro’s downfall in the face of an outraged public, they probably should have given that another think. If we have learned anything in today’s politics and diplomacy, it’s that people will believe what they want to believe. Some might even convince themselves that Maduro is a good leader, or that his wife’s nephews were just daydreaming about drug trafficking.

Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.

The Goals of Communism

(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.